Peter J. Wasilko, Esq., J.D., LL.M.
Director, The Continuity Project
futurist@cloud9.net
Designers of online communities can learn much from the evolution of our legal system. However, the affordances of the digital environment and the higher levels of consensus possible in planned online affinity communities will permit the design of considerably more streamlined and transparent quasi-legal processes. Likewise, architectural processes as well as legal ones come into play when exploring the less restrictive design space of virtual worlds. By adopting the approach taken by the Pattern Language movement to the legal and technical context of online communities, it becomes possible to promote their organic growth and enhance their long term viability. This is the strategy being pursued by The Continuity Project in its efforts to unify Hypertext, Digital Library, Metacomputing, End User Programming, and Online Community research to transform the online public access catalog into a collaborative medium for the social construction of knowledge.
Any modern legal system is a study in complexity. But underlying this seemingly chaotic structure are a few basic patterns that have been combined and overlaid to reinforce or mitigate each other's effects as countless players vie for personally beneficial results. Indeed, game play is perhaps the most appropriate analogy and economic model to capture the evolution of this process.
To give you a feel for the texture of law in the real world, I offer these tables:
This last table will probably be of the most value in deciding what to incorporate in rules for online communities. Also, do note that the Law is very much a hypertextual medium and those working in and with it are particularly well served by the affordances of modern open hypermedia systems.
One interesting quasi-statutory format worthy of examination is the minority approach to the regulation of attorney conduct still followed by The New York State Bar Association and adopted by our state's courts. The Lawyer's Code of Professional Responsibility is divided into nine Cannons delineating problem areas that distinguish between aspirational Ethical Considerations and enforceable Disciplinary Rules that are further clarified by related commentary in a number of advisory Opinions.
As we mirror such legal patterns online, we enjoy a number of advantages. Entire classes of problems, like questions of evidence and the enforcement of judgments, can be engineered away. Work on Law and AI, focusing on topics like Self-Revealing Software and the Normalization of Legal Statues, is quite illuminating in this regard. Moreover, community founders don't have to contend with the entrenched interests that distort the real legal/legislative process and can adopt a proactive stance towards dispute resolution. But this initial period of flexibility won't last for long as our communities grow, so we must strive from the outset to create organic self-regulating processes.
The best source for this kind of design sensibility can be found in Christopher Alexander's decidedly Taoist pattern language trilogy ("The Timeless Way of Building", "A Pattern Language", and "The Oregon Experiment"). For our purposes, the rarely cited "Oregon Experiment" is most directly on point, arguing for principles of Organic Order (the quality of community as an emergent property of many small acts), Piecemeal Growth (construction biased toward small projects), Participation (User Centered Design), Patterns (periodically updated exemplars of things that work and their relations to other archetypes at different scales of abstraction), Diagnosis (identification of dead spaces), and Coordination (a funding process that relates proposed changes to a community's patterns and diagnosis).
Consider, online communities like MediaMOO which coalesce around a charismatic leader and whither between special events. Diagnosis - the space lacks affordances to draw participants between events. Repair - embed individually useful facilities in the shared space and make tools written to extend this environment severable from it.
This approach lies at the core of my research in The Continuity Project.